The University of Michigan has around a 15% acceptance rate. How is it possible that they’re letting in kids who aren’t ready to do college level work? What are they selecting for?
The University I went to has like an 80% acceptance rate so it's not comparable, but I was surprised when I got into 400-level CS classes and there were people who didn't know how to program at all.
Our professor assigned us to write a fast fourier transform, and when we had class next week apparently everyone claimed that it was too difficult so he changed the assignment to "find an implementation online and write about it"
I feel really grateful I graduated before the advent of LLMs because it was really easy to stand out as a good student when the standards are apparently so low.
Side tangent but in the same class he caught people zero-citation copy-pasting from Wikipedia on the papers we were assigned to write, and the guys acted like they had no idea you couldn't do that.
I went to a state school. The quality varied wildly depending on the department. It was very eye opening in the general English/writing classes when encountering people who couldn't read nor write above a 4th grade level. The difference between they're, their, and there was like a riddle to some of them. Of course many didn't make it more than a semester or two.
That's the big thing - the college might be dropping the first semester grades so they can squeeze a second semester of tuition out of kids.
It's a pretty different environment going from high school to college. There's a dynamic change that's pretty sudden where your parents are no long really in the picture for support.
What they are trying to do is keep the kids that would otherwise do well but might freak out in the first semester. Seems pretty fine to me especially since those are grades that if we are being honest really don't matter anyways.
It’s not actually less certain now than it was then. It’s just the media has gotten louder. Cuban missilie crisis, civil rights, world wars, nuclear weapons, it has all been happening for a while.
On all fronts we are having a easier time than before.
Healthcare, safety, life expectancy, disease, mental health (yes, you disagree, but it not being existant in the past kinda sets tue bar).
He just said: they freaked out, dropped out and did some less qualified work. Meanwhile inept kids from money who were taught that form them effort is not required went on to get lucrative jobs without merit, and now Trump is president.
The coddling is a big problem these days, and this focus on mental health is itself unhealthy. The assessment that "they would otherwise do well" is speculative, at best.
Because in America, Ivy versus non-Ivy isn't the distinction.
What matters is your major and whether it is a well respected program.
A CS@Texas student will have the ability to open the exact same doors professionally and prestige wise than a CS@Brown student.
You have Ivies, Ivy Tier Privates (Stanford, Chicago, Duke, USC, Caltech, MIT, NYU, Northwestern), and Public Ivies (Cal, UCLA, UCSD, Mich, UIUC, UW, UT, GT, Purdue, UNC Chapel Hill, UVA) that all recruit the same kind of applicant.
Do you know what it takes to get admitted into Mich tier programs in 2026?
Kids will take multiple APs (taking 10+ isn't unheard of), do multiple extracurriculars (debate, MUN, DECA sports, academic olympiads, theatre), volunteering (NHS, CSF, etc), and even take college classes in high school.
On top of that while tests are optional, most students still submit their SAT and ACT, and the expectation of 1500+ and 35+ still holds.
And even then there's no guarantee you'll get in.
Most applicants who successfully get into Ivies, impacted majors with single digit acceptance rates at Mich or Cal tier programs like EECS or a BBA, and other peer programs are basically burnt out by 17-18 (the age most kids at these programs now matriculate).
And the first semester is not impactful in any shape or form. It's best to take summary and intro classes as P/NP to even the playing field and then throw in a weed-out class (in CS that was historically data structures or OS).
So many HNers complain about how the younger generation is hyper-competitive yet when universities start taking steps to help reduce that they start kvetching.
Heck, with my profile from the late 2000s and early 2010s (right when everything became hyper-competitive and optimized), I actually wouldn't have a shot at most programs at Mich especially when I compare it to my sibling's profile who also attended a Mich tier engineering undergrad.
Back when I went to University of Rochester in the early 90's, the entire first year was not included in your GPA. So we still got grades, but they didn't count for anything. But in my junior year, the state of NY told the school that they would lose their accreditation if they kept it up, because they saw it as unfairly raising the GPA of UR graduates versus all other NY universities. So while my class was grandfathered in, the practice was stopped the next year for the incoming freshman class.
Studying my 4 year BSc in Scotland: the first two years didn’t “count” to your overall grade and had more “required” modules/classes (e.g. maths for CS degrees).
This had pros and cons:
- it was nice to have a bit more of a gradual build
- this would probably avoid some of the issues here
- if you are lazy like me: you do bare minimum effort first and second year and then get crushed by both workload and lack of foundational knowledge in third year
- if you apply to a US company, some will want to see your “full transcript” and don’t accept “I was too busy playing CS (Counterstrike) to study CS (Computer Science)”
When you force high school kids to work days that are significantly longer than a normal adult to achieve a good GPA and get into a good college, you can expect that they are going to throttle back once they're away from home with way more free time than is normal.
From my kid's experience: she was up at 6:30am, in AP classes by 7:30am (three more to go during the day). Classes were done by 3:00, then sports practice until 5:00. Gotta have that activity on your college application, not counting other volunteering and clubs in the open spaces. Then homework after dinner until 10:00 or so, sometimes much later. Homework assigned over weekends. Homework assigned over breaks.
That's 15+ hours a day, every weekday, for an entire school year. Then you have test prep (APs and the ACT/SAT), college applications, writing essays and scholarship applications, college tours, sorting decisions, financial aid applications, etc etc etc. And now her college already has a few hours of orientation videos stacked up for her to watch before she moves in.
Personally, I don't blame her if she checks out for a few weeks. Or a semester.
> sports practice until 5:00. Gotta have that activity on your college application, not counting other volunteering and clubs in the open spaces.
Still baffles me why is that even a thing that's considered at the colleges. I thought it was just a relic of Soviet past but no, apparently it exists in the US and other first world countries as well for some strange reason.
I have heard that it began to try to keep certain ethnic groups out of university and continued because sports bring in scholarship and (for D1 schools) sponsor money.
A lot of this is just inflicted by parent culture and anxiety. Unless your kid applying to an elite school, most college/university accept between 60-80% of their applicants. If they have decent GPA.
We are making the kids endure that out of fear of their college, but stats don't back up the grind they make the kids do.
> she was up at 6:30am, in AP classes by 7:30am (three more to go during the day). Classes were done by 3:00, then sports practice until 5:00.
In other States, high school starts later like 8:45/9am. You can take classes online and start school later if you want or do dual enrollment and skip later periods.
> Gotta have that activity on your college application, not counting other volunteering and clubs in the open spaces.
Mine worked and were in clubs. Kids are remarkably resilient. In some States, work time counts in lieu of volunteer time.
> Then you have test prep (APs and the ACT/SAT), college applications, writing essays and scholarship applications, college tours, sorting decisions, financial aid applications, etc etc etc. And now her college already has a few hours of orientation videos stacked up for her to watch before she moves in.
This sounds like a lot of undue pressure. UCF didn’t make you do that. ACT or SAT works and you have a couple years to do it. Not all at once in Senior year and you usually can composite your score across the highest tests.
7:30 is consistent with my experience in Oregon. Work does not count in lieu of volunteer time if you're writing an essay about your involvement with the community. I don't think schools NEED both ACT or SAT but you only have so many shots and may have an affinity for one or the other, so people like to take both.
I am still traumatizes from high school after almost 30 years. I had no extra-curricular activities but I had to travel far for the school of choice (I was an ESL student). Waking up at 5:45, 90 minute travel one way, then 8-9 periods ending at around 5PM. Get home at 7 and then do homework.
Then the never-ending pressure of midterms, finals, and regents exams.
Same with my kids. At the bus stop by 6:30am, out doing sports and extra-curriculars until 8pm, then dinner+homework until 11pm or so, rinse and repeat.
Are normal adults not "working" in a similar way to your kid for 15+ hours per weekday?
Comparable adult parent things would be up at 6am, prep kids for school day, in the office by 8am, 8 hours of work plus a lunch, departing the office around 5pm, transporting kids to/from some activities, dinner, helping kids with homework, somehow fit in regular shopping needs (food, essentials, etc), maybe some volunteering or hobby things, if lucky in bed by 10pm, and we're easily at 15 hours of "work" on a weekday.
Very challenging at times, but for example I sleep with my kid hugging me, or I chat with them while in the car, or we do chores while watching tv or something like that.
And not every day is packed like that, you can tell your kids "no more than 3 times per week of activties, the other 2 days are for playdates", and that should be acceptable.
There are horrible days of the week, but it's not daily 15 hours of work. That's training for slavery.
Homework for break and homework for weekend should be STRONGLY ILLEGAL.
That is a weird (modern?) delusion. Without children, our species disappears in <100 years. And the last of those years would be painful for those still alive.
Those who are having and raising children are the ones doing the most for the next generation.
we wake up at 7, prep the kids to school, they walk there alone then, we have coffee together, then I drive to the office by usually 9:30. have a proper lunch break with colleagues, then in the office until 6pm or so, then drive home, have dinner, put the kids in bed by 8, then we can watch a movie/do hobbies/etc.
while I work, my wife can do the shopping and take care of other household chores if needed.
Most of the stay at home spouses I know come from lower middle class households and they’ve made their lifestyle, living location, and other spending decisions fit their desired work arrangement. Even many of the construction contractors I’ve talked to recently (which is a decent number due to some remodel work) have stay at home wives.
What most people can’t afford is to maintain their desired lifestyle and only have one parent working. It’s similar to how people earning 3-4X the median wages for an area will think they’re barely getting by, while someone earning 1/4 of what they do is raising a family with two kids.
Naw. Adult life is so much easier with regards to competitive pressure compared to getting into a good college. The real world is Pass/Fail, much to the chagrin of plenty of HNers.
> Adult life is so much easier with regards to competitive pressure compared to getting into a good college
You’re competing apples and oranges. Getting into a top college is similar to grinding to get into Big Tech jobs and then climb the ladder there.
Good colleges are easy. The top few colleges are very hard.
> The real world is Pass/Fail, much to the chagrin of plenty of HNers.
If by “fail” you mean lose your job in the next round of layoffs and have your career derailed, possibly.
You’re still comparing apples and oranges. The people who compete for top college spots usually continue competing for promotions and better paying jobs. The people who coast through high school look for jobs where they can coast and then get comfortable with whatever salary that provides them.
I have several hobbies that are popular with kids (mountain biking, rock climbing, and some others).
I can assure you that there are plenty of kids with more time than I have to dedicate to these hobbies at every popular spot I go to. Many of them are ambitious, smart, and working toward top universities, too. It’s actually fun energy to be around.
The parent comment about students getting up at 6:30AM and working 15 hour days is highly unusual.
Why should we change the practice of putting people to work to build civilization when they’re at their physical and energetic peak? In his early 20s my dad helped overthrow the Pakistani government, and by his late 20s and early 30s he was helping tackle the astronomical infant and maternal mortality in the country. Why shouldn’t our young people in America work?
Your comment specifically compared it to the normal adult, my point is the normal adult who is a parent is very likely doing even more than your example of your kid. Even for adults who aren't in the elite high earner category, heck people who make less money are likely working even more hours per day just to make ends meet.
How, exactly, are they working more? How many low-paying jobs offer overtime, if they are full time at all? Any clue how many jobs won't let you work a part-time job or won't work around another job? Can't exactly work for Uber if you can't afford a decent enough car. And this is assuming you have older children that don't need childcare.
The fact is that they aren't working extra, not for a job anyway. The extra work comes in the time making dried beans instead of buying canned, in repairing stuff poorly, in shopping around for a doctor that takes the state health insurance or an affordable option if you have none at all, in taking busses (if they are available), and other unpaid things. Your child will be lucky to afford the activities that gets them a 'good' education, especially if they have to work.
That is exactly OP's point: for OP, if a child's "working hours" includes university prep and resume-padding sports activities, then an adult's "working hours" includes housework, grocery shopping, dealing with insurance and taxes, and commute/family chauffeur time.
As adult with job and kids, I honestly don't work as much as a kid described in that comment. It is in fact way less competitive. I get a good pay, my job is reasonably interesting (ai can make it sux and probably will, but we are not there yet). There are parts that sux or where I am under pressure, but overall, it is better to be an adult then to be teenager trying to get to competitive school.
And for the record, I had to work less to get to good school back then.
"It takes a ton of pressure to make a diamond". I read that in a game when I was a kid and took it as a guiding principle in my life.
Overcoming hard times absolutely made me a better person, but as I've grown I've seen many examples of the fallout you're referring to. Sometimes people just break.
Sometimes I wonder where all these HNers work. The majority of "slightly below top companies" seem to consist of mediocre workers, which is fine. Employees are just doing their job and if they fuck up, even badly, it's not too difficult for them to get a new job. Meanwhile a student getting a few subpar grades, often for reasons beyond their control, should somehow be punished forever.
I don't get all this existential talk about college acceptance. Yes, elite schools should expect elite applicants.
Meanwhile, the state school down the road is a fraction the cost, teaches a lot of the same content, and will accept anyone with a pulse. In my state, at least. State universities are somewhat competitive to get into, but state colleges... wide open.
All of which is very real-world. Certain top firms recruit only top candidates. Everyone else works somewhere further along the spectrum.
> I don't get all this existential talk about college acceptance. Yes, elite schools should expect elite applicants.
As a non-US person who's worked for a bunch of US companies, my belief is that the Ivy League et al act as a class system, rather than a symbol of educational attainment.
I’ve known a lot of Ivy League graduates and they were all very smart. Most of them were very good people, too. A lot of them came from backgrounds that didn’t include wealth or social connections.
This goes against the stereotypes you read online, but many of them are motivated by a desire to sneer and cut down others’ achievements. Look up “tall poppy syndrome” for one phrase describing this phenomenon.
HN is centered around venture capital, which in college terms is the subtopic of branch Finance under Business Administration. SJSU, a top business school half an hour south of YC Palo Alto, has an intensely competitive Investment program that admits very few applicants for which students directly manage an investment fund; meanwhile, their Accounting under B.A. program is admitting anyone with a GPA of 2.2 or higher. That duality can be deeply confusing to people on the glamorous side of the fence: why would SJSU cheapen itself by admitting literally everyone it possibly can into Accounting by, when being highly selective results in such a high quality Investment program? That confusion fades rapidly when considered from the other direction: Investment is where the glory is, for those who seek that, and for the rest of us, there’s Accounting and Finance.
While HN, VCs, SJSU, and Tech are obviously not composed of the same population or applying the same restrictions, it’s certainly reasonable to highlight one similarity: the potential glory of one’s role at work directly impacts how competitive it is. That we’re currently in a nightmarish layoff cycle due to the ZIRP bubble popping and due to businesses replacing costly (and glorious) creative roles with more economical PREs (prompt reliability engineers) is amplifying this effect more strongly in Tech than in other industries, because Tech — just like the Investing industry that’s underpinned it for so long — has been saturated with glory and competitiveness.
I spent my career in tech working in the roles that do not offer glory — IT, rather than Product; Cost Centers, rather than Profit Centers — but even within IT, there were a couple of roles that had more glory and were much more competitive in their selection and evaluation criteria than others. At my final IT job, we were less strict about credentials and competitiveness with directors and vice presidents than we were about the high-glory role of enterprise architect. So while I do empathize with HN’s bias, having myself once pursued glory in tech, such competitiveness is abnormal in most jobs in most fields.
All of the AI companies are what I would consider top companies and all of them have had consistent outages because of bugs. OpenAI resets Codex limits almost weekly because of a major outage. Top companies have plenty of average employees.
Only if you make it so. Good college/university means little in many jobs. The best devs for example (and most paid correspondingly since they knew their value very well) I've ever met were either coming out of subpar schools or skipped university altogether.
I myself went through mediocre noname university in eastern Europe with OK grades and it didn't matter at all, now I get perm salary thats better than 99% of devs in whole Europe while doing just that and nothing more, while sporting 10 weeks of paid vacation yearly. Quality of life further down the line, success and happiness are extremely non-correlated with all this academic stuff.
Its just control freak helicopter parents, which, albeit with good underlying intentions, fuck up everything they touch, including mental health of their kids. So kids compete just to endlessly compete while winning less than nothing. This is how deep regrets later in life are made.
Personally, I don't blame her if she checks out for a few weeks. Or a semester.
Nor would I, but I'd also accept that she did so and failed a few classes.
Just like I did in the 90s. Although in my case it wasn't burn-out, but system shock at actually having to try to get good grades (Fairfax County PS then UVA).
Did that bombed first semester probably eliminate med school or an elite graduate program? Sure. But I probably wasn't cut out for either anyway. And it was a kick in the pants and got me to pay attention and work.
Yes, same here, for me high school was easy and I failed (or effectively failed, a D counted the same as an F) a couple classes right out of the gate. It was a lesson to myself that I never learned to study in high school and had to learn that skill ASAP.
Michigan and its apologists here would rob these kids of real-world experience, reducing them to infants. And then we're all disappointed when these adults act like infants.
Robbing the students of that experience would be to hand them an inflated letter grade. If anything this encourages instructors not to be gentle in grading first semester students. Students who eke out a low C grade will get the warning and can calibrate the level of effort needed (or switch fields) without the impact on grad school admissions or intern/new grad job search.
This schedule is no different than my schedule from 30 years ago and I don't consider it problematic at all. You frame it as 15+ hour days by including all aspects of their day as "work" but no normal adult includes their workout time and their social engagements as part of their work day. Time spent in sports is fun, not work. If it is work, then quit. Time spent in gym class and lunch is not work. Remove all that bloat from your framing and it is a very reasonable workload.
Yes, if you go to a junior college or night school, you will discover what an actual busy schedule looks like and it's not sports clubs and volunteer activities taken for the sole purpose of inflating your college admissions letter.
Some of those students have 40 hour jobs, some night shift, that they can't skip or else they don't have a home or school anymore. Others have kids that can't be neglected.
It is fun when it is fun, when you can skip it or do it purely because you want to. If you go to sports club because you have to, it is work and not fun.
If you go volunteer or have to join the club for college application, they become work. They are not fun stuff.
> Time spent in gym class and lunch is not work
Gym class is work. Kids are not there voluntarily.
Absolutely. I can barely sleep when I feel pressure of what I am have to do next day, especially if it is something stressful. When somebody would be measuring performance of my sleep the idea of sleep would be stressing me out.
Sports club and volunteering are neither restorative nor relax. Sports are another competitive activity you are supposed to excel at. You dont do it to rest and relax.
You come in and do what you are told. You don't chat with friends or play around, you focus on whatever trainer told you to focus at. You dont do what you want to do, but what trainer thinks will make you more performant. And if it hurts or you are tired or just really want to do something else, you still do it.
Indeed. At uni, starting in my second year, I worked as a programmer (no remote work, office at 1hr commute from uni dorm) on top of my studies. It was hard, but doable. My major was applied math, so the CS part was the easier bit, but the math, especially Analysis, Numerical Methods, Linear Algebra, and Analytic Geometry they kicked my butt. We also had a really bad prof for the Math Logic class and no textbook, only lecture notes and his lectures were unstructured shit :(
The biggest problem wasn't the workload itself, but how inefficient learning was back then. It was the early days of the Internet, no coursera, no Google indexed uni sites, no LLMs, no online tutors. I only had a mediocre textbook and some notes I borrowed from friends when I couldn't attend lectures or labs. It took ages. I’d burn hours trying to parse two paragraphs in the textbook, only to ask mates who didn't understand it either.
Now, we have an incredible amount of information & tech at our fingertips: LLMs, Google NotebookLM, online tutors, dozens of textbooks, and sites like Anna's Archive packed with high-quality "free" material. With all this technology, the time it takes to understand, prepare, and master a topic is a fraction of what it used to be. It still takes work and discipline, but man... you can feed textbooks into an LLM and use targeted prompts to debug your exact knowledge gaps on the practice test you get from the LLM.
So I reckon it's easier now than before, simply because learning can be done so much more efficiently. After all these years, I still remember the hardest classes and the most stringent professors with great affection - even though I hated those bastards back then. My Group Theory prof once invalidated a definition I wrote because of a single missing word. At the time, I thought it was an injustice, but later I realized that word was crucial.
University is where young people must face hard work and reality, because it teaches them what true meritocracy is. It should be hard, it's the same way a gym workout should be hard or it’s ineffective.
We need to normalize a gap year, or at least a gap semester. Young adults need a break after the pressure of graduation and college admissions, and whether it’s work or travel, some perspective helps ground the college experience and make it a choice instead of an obligation.
In my experience, many freshmen treated their first year as a gap year anyways, especially if they took difficult senior classes. First year classes aren’t always as rigorous as good AP classes (depending on both the high school and the university), so you can skip or cram while partying.
Sorry if this seems naive but do students in America actually work that hard these days? Modern television and social media seem to suggest they are all on drugs and doing God knows what
This is fairly representative experience for high achieving students. When I was in high school, I was typically up at 6:30 AM to get to my 7:00 AM AP class. Classes can end anywhere from 3-4 pm, depending on your course work. After school clubs and activities ranged from commitment. But we were under the assumption that it mattered a lot for college admissions, so many of us participated in 2-3. Once you got home, you had a considerably amount of homework from each class. If you were prepping for standardized exams, you probably dedicated some time to study that as well. Overall, I felt the amount of time spent working in high school was taxing. But also it worked out for me - went to a good college and got a good job and life.
I remember waking around 7am and leaving school around 3pm, then no more than on average ~2 hours of extracurriculars and ~2 hours of homework.
I think the quantity was reasonable, except too much busywork, I wish I could replace it with subjects I was passionate about (i.e. tech).
I also had the entire summer between senior year and college to decompress.
Nowadays I hear that most public schools are giving less work. With all due respect, I believe GP is an anomaly and/or it wasn't the school, but their own pressure.
Just to present another reality... a lot of kids coast through high school academically. They sleep through classes or play video games on their school-provided laptops, or play on their phones all day. They know about "minimum-F" policies where submitting 0 work earns them 50%. And they don't really care about getting Ds. Then some community support program assigns them a counselor who drags them over some finish line to get them admitted to a community college.
No, this isn't every high school student. But there are more people in the group I describe than there are in the group you describe.
Here's my point: There is a lot of ground between the two extremes. And both ends of the spectrum are making it into college of some sort. So it you think your child is under too much stress from taking seven AP classes, drop four of them. If they are overwhelmed by tennis practice, ... maybe recognize that removing all friction from a person's life is not necessarily a good thing. Work together to build coping skills. But no child has to be an Olympic medalist neurosurgeon senator CEO all at the same time. Who is "forcing" that on high school students? You?
There is plenty of room for people with 3.2 GPAs and only two AP classes when they graduate. Frankly, with some family support, it is not that hard to have a 3.8 GPA for 60+% of students.
But I've seen high school valedictorians with 3.9 college GPAs graduate and struggle to find a white collar job. What is the plan for that from U Mich?
> But I've seen high school valedictorians with 3.9 college GPAs graduate and struggle to find a white collar job. What is the plan for that from U Mich?
they've optimized for a highly stratified educational environment. The real world don't work like that.
Unless you stay in academia no one cares about your GPA 2 years after you leave.
When you are contrasting a hypothetical example against an anecdotal example, it is polite to provide some sort of evidence your hypothetical example actually exists.
That blows my mind. It seems so unnecessary. It also doesn't seem to work given where the US ranks globally in education. Is the problem what the admission process? In the UK, even to get into the most prestigious universities you do the same exams as everyone else, maybe a little extra-curricular stuff, and interview with the university. The amount of studying in the evening is no different than anyone else trying to get a good grade, and there are certainly no extra classes you can take (never mind starting the schooldays before the normal time).
If the sports and clubs are stressful, your kid should find other activities.
I did everything you mentioned in the nineties and aughts (my sport was year round and coach expected us to travel on our own dime to tournaments that lasted the entire weekend at least four times in the summer, and during the school year I was out of town most Sat-Sun at tournaments, which take way more time than the couple hours a volleyball game lasts or whatever), and volunteer activities that lasted until 10pm for a few week stretches a few times a year.
I had a blast doing things I loved. Counting travel, 30+ hours a week of sports. School from 6:30 to 3:30 (because I took an extra AP physics class that happened before school officially started). I acted in community theatre. I did martial arts. I quit tennis to teach acting for the YMCA my senior year.
Why doesn't your kid love the sport she plays? Why doesn't she love the volunteer activities? Those are meant to be FUN. Like, that's why the colleges want them: to see why she's an interesting person, not a time-management robot. They can tell these things, so stop gaming the system ad find a hobby she'll be so obsessed with that she'll write a college entrance essay all about how it made her a more interesting person.
There is no adcom in the world that is trying to find a selfless 17yo who does drudgery because it's expected of them. They're trying to find people who LOVE building for Habitat, who want to be chefs and serve at a soup kitchen, who LOVE God and ran tech support during COVID for their church livestream, etc.
> This is about gunning for the elite/upper echelons of society.
Is that what it’s about? Keep in that the University of Michigan is a public university, explicitly founded to “provide the inhabitants of this state with the means of acquiring a thorough knowledge of the various branches of literature, science, and the arts.” There’s nothing about being elite in there at all. This is an institution that serves the public.
I’m no stranger to long hours to achieve high status—I’m a professor. But I also started my journey at a public school and a public undergraduate institution. Many of my friends—all good and smart people but in many cases decidedly NOT elite-have leveraged their public education into satisfying careers. I, and my friends, would not have had our opportunities otherwise. I simply could not afford top private school.
I don’t know what to think about this change exactly, but it’s worth pointing out that MIT has had this policy for first year students since 1968. MIT! Seems like UM can make this work if they are thoughtful about it.
All universities are for the elites. I would love for that not to be the case, but the only reason admissions are this competitive is because there's competition for limited slots.
And yes, certainly a (traditional) university education should not be required for having good career opportunities.
IMO there's a need for a type of education that's vastly more scalable and still equips people with the beyond-secondary education they need to be productive in today's economy.
I’m not sure where you get the idea that all universities are competitive because that is simply untrue. Many public universities are required by state legislatures to broadly admit students from their own state. California is a good example. You can see incoming class statistics here: https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/entering-class-...
Competitive universities are competitive. Sometimes that competiton is justified and sometimes it is unjustifiably based on pedigree. The program I attended before getting my PhD at a public university was at a well-known private university. But in terms of research productivity and impact, the public university was a MUCH better place to go to school. The PhD program was exceptionally competitive but its undergrad program was not. As a result, many undergrads who wandered through our lab door got a first-class research experience.
I’m not going to pretend that pedigree doesn’t matter (to some people), but it is emphatically not the same thing as “a good preparation.” I took a couple math classes one summer at a low-tier state college. They were just as good as any math classes I took at any of the other places I went to school, public or private.
The ones that aren't competitive don't have the ultra-competitive dynamics described above. Not sure what your point is.
That still doesn't mean they're not "for the elites." Universities are for people striving for upward mobility, i.e. to get into or maintain membership in the elite tiers of society. Also there is (obviously) significant variation in the upper end of the elite and the lower end.
More than a third of the US population has a college degree. [1] When you consider the fact that 20% of the US population are children [2] that means that roughly half of the eligible US population has a college degree. If “half” is elite, then I’m not sure what “elite” means, because it’s not very exclusive.
> Not sure what your point is.
Well, you said
> All universities are for the elites.
And then I countered that, actually, many are not selective. I am asking you to reconsider your statement. In reality, many college programs confer _skills_, not _status_. This narrative that colleges are for the elites is demonstrably untrue, runs counter to the founding mission of many of them, and strikes me as sour grapes. I know because I was one of the kids who struggled to afford college, went to a public one where I learned _skills_, which I then leveraged into a satisfying career.
The costs would have to go down significantly. And I don't just mean the direct price to students – even public universities are extremely costly overall.
It costs ~$55k/year to educate a student at UMich. That's more than half of the median US family's income. And UMich is a massive success story. Excellent academic output at a relatively great price – but even there the actual cost would bankrupt a normal American family.
That's a lot of money to spend educating someone into a non-elite trajectory in life, no? Never mind the opportunity cost of 4 years where one could be acquiring direct skills in whatever job they're going into?
Let me tell you about the scam of 'honors' classes in today's high schools. They not doing anything more introspective or challenging. It's the same classwork thrown at them faster and without as much teaching support. Just more to grind out. But when you don't understand something?
You're smart, you'll figure it out.
In return you get inflated GPAs that get you into better colleges. But if you can't figure it out on the first try? More stress.
Interestingly, a lot of colleges now ignore the 'honors' weighted GPA and ask to see the unweighted score. If you have a teen entering high school, skip the honors track and help them do better in the normal track version of the class. See if your school offers dual-credit with a local community college or state university. Those transfer credits are WAY more valuable now (and cheaper!) than an AP score, with a lot less test stress.
I agree partially with your first point and almost entirely with your 2nd point:
After emerging from an ap/ib honors program in highschool (with excellent teachers) I became increasingly stressed in college when any real simple lack of comprehension occurred. I was smort. I should "get it."
However, later in life the ideas from books or concepts we read, discussed, and critiqued (Doestevsky,Shakespeare, sophocles etc) allowed me access to ideas in the humanities that far outweighed that initial college whiplash.
So it's a trade off I would certainly make again.
Knowing what I know now, I definitely would've opted for dual-credit rather than honors/AP classes, and CLEPed out of the remainder of freshman year basics.
Yeah definitely. But "can you grind" is legitimate selection criterion for making it into the upper echelons. Not an ideal one, but it's not illegitimate.
Can you teach yourself, broadly. Out of all the filters we have in education, this one might be the most legitimate because it maps pretty closely to lifelong curiosity and learning.
Working like a dog like this is necessary if you’re gunning for the elite / upper echelon of society, yes. If you’re already in that echelon of society, it’s not necessary.
Thank goodness I didn’t need to work so hard, but I can acknowledge what a shitty system it is.
Help me understand why these children or their parents are gunning in this manner and working like dogs in this manner, to join into and propagate such a shitty system?
I'm all for not diluting anything but dropping first semester/year grades is unlikely to cause any major issue IMO. You can encourage lighter electives maybe and remove some elective requirements from later in the course. Already first year courses are fairly generic/light anyways. The purpose is simply to ramp up the competitiveness the same way school itself ramps up over the years. Pretending school momentum carries over to college is just stupid.
Universities at least apply some meritocratic standards. If we bypass universities, there will be some other gatekeeper, it will be worse: mostly an "old boys network" and corrupt, pay-to-play advancement.
Seems like the country was more competently governed before the current university system, though. If its job is to gate keep incompetence out of leadership it is failing spectacularly.
When you consider the complexification of any single industry over the last 50 to 100 years, then multiply that by every single other industry, then multiply that by the newly complex interactions between industries, then consider that the government must keep some degree of handle on all of that complexity, and consider that they must do it with a smaller headcount per capita (even before Trump) than ever before, against better-funded and more sophisticated "adversaries" (people/orgs trying to evade government management) than ever before ...
It seems very possible to me that the managers of said system are far better than ever before and still fail to produce spectacular results.
Surely if it was wasting productive time in industry, then companies would just hire people directly out of high school, no? There's a reason they don't do that.
Sad state that of affairs when comments like this appear and have affirmative replies. Shows how socially unaware and one-dimensional a Hacker News is.
Competition continues to rise for limited higher education slots. The solution is not to get rid of the measurements we use to decide who should occupy those slots, it's to add more slots (and ideally, also create viable career/life opportunities that do not require a super-expensive education to begin with).
Can you explain how that's "socially unaware" or "one-dimensional"?
> It's for students that have had their grades inflated in High school and got into the university based on their ethnic background, instead of merit/points on the SAT.
Why only students who got in based on ethnicity? What about students who only got in because their parents are wealthy or alumni? Or students who get in because of athletics but wouldn't otherwise meet academic admissions criteria? I don't know why there's all this focus (and pushback) on race based admissions when there are multiple other meritless avenues for students to get into college. That people focus on eliminating one and not the others is very telling.
It isn’t racist to acknowledge that some schools select students based on factors other than demonstrated aptitude. In the last ten years it was a fad in the US to not require SAT scores until folks realized this was dumb and reversed course.
You can select by aptitude and also not select only white people. You're saying you have to lower the bar for people that aren't white. That's the racist part. And the whole DEI culture war bullshit in politics. There's no bar lowering involved.
This kind of applicant is now treated as table stakes for programs like UMich, and acceptance rates for impacted majors like CS in top programs have dropped to single digits.
It is ridiculously competitive to get into top programs now. I got into an Ivy in the late 2000s to early 2010s. With my stats from back then (13 APs all 4s and 5s, a 4.5+ GPA, varsity wrestling, JV XCountry, NHS, CSF, USAPHO, USAMO, Policy and LD debate, a 2200+ SAT, 35 ACT, 8 SAT Subject test), I would have been lucky to get into CS@UC Davis today and I absolutely wouldn't have gotten into my alma mater.
Then why is getting into M.S programs much easier? The GRE is barely an exam and it's not like you need to go to an IIT or do any olympiads to get into columbia or a good UC. Yes in principle you have fewer applicants than bachelors, but that would be compensated by the fact that indians and chinese students also apply no?
> Then why is getting into M.S programs much easier?
Because domestic undergrads applying to a research-oriented grad program are advised to apply directly to a PhD program.
MS/MA programs are expected to remediate deficiencies at the undergrad level, and most undergrads will take 1st year MS/MA classes as part of their senior year doing a bachelors. Alternatively, the MS/MA is awarded if a PhD candidate failed Quals.
Outside the US, the expected path is BA/BSc/BEng/BTech to MS/MA/MTech/MPhil to PhD.
In the US, the expected path is SB/AB to PhD and MS/MA if you fail quals or are looking for a professional program to remediate coursework deficiencies.
Is she typical or atypical of the kids having issues? My bet is the kids having issues are ones that were less academically inclined. Perhaps they were misled throughout primary education (trophies for everyone, equality of results rather than opportunity, dumbed down mathematics, skipping physics as a req., etc.)
I don’t think kids like yours are having issues but rather kids who didn’t apply themselves academically.
Basically A or even B grades cannot be an average grade. C or 2.0 would be the expected average but of course this hasn’t been close to true since GWB introduced his idiotic policy.
It’s no secret, if you let kids (or people) slack, 80 to 90% will slack off. 10 to 20% will endure out of principle or habit.
Given that 75% of all grades in 2022 were A's, grade inflation has already made the indicator value of grades pretty meaningless. I think this take from a student captures it well:
> Louth, 20 years old, said he earned all A’s and one B in his first semester and doubted he would have worked as hard had the classes been pass/fail. But he thinks he would have learned more from his classes without the pressure of earning high marks.
The first semester should help students explore and engage their curiosity. I think it's a good move and hope the experiment succeeds
But it's not true. Cute to say that, but I wouldn't believe it. Just like most students, given the opportunity to use AI to essentially cheat will often do so (look at the stunning percentages professors are detecting when they bother to try to figure it out), the same applies here; given the option to study these things more deeply or fire up Tinder, Facebook, Minecraft or whatever, they're going to do the latter.
It sounds okay at first glance, but how many people are going to get saddled with an extra semester of debt now because they didn't figure out they weren't suite/ready for college yet but were just passed along through the first semester anyways?
Completely agree. My first semester of university was straight up hazing, which at the time felt like crap.
The consequence though, was that every single person who stayed on the course actually cared about being there. Staying motivated for the next three and a half years was made so much easier because the first six months were so difficult.
People called them "weeder" classes in my university.
But it's better earlier rather than later. The consequences aren't severe and you can change majors, lessen your course load, or stop those volunteer opportunities. That's part of learning how to be an adult.
I knew a few people my freshmen year that were put on academic probation. They turned out all right after making some drastic changes. Others simply disappeared during the break.
Apart from the notion of a moral obligation that may now seem quaint and old-fashioned, you’re talking about their customers who are paying for an education. The responsibility rests partly on the school for solving these challenges. Declaring students “weeds” would tell you all you need to know about the place.
If it's simply pay to win then the value of a degree from an institution falls to absolutely zero. If the product a student is buying is a credential that's supposed to say "I know and can do things, pay me money please" then in order for that credential to fulfill its objective then low performing and mediocre students ("weeds") need to be filtered out. Otherwise, employers and the wider world will quickly realize the credential is meaningless.
I'm sorry but this is straight up a non serious reply. If you want to be in STEM you need to pass calculus, then the specific majors have their own "weed out" courses which is good. There should be some base level of competence and if you can't pass, say, Abstract Algebra then you can't get a degree in mathematics.
There needs to be some sort of academic baseline for university otherwise what is the difference between a youtube playlist and a semester worth of credits?
First, I was a 'provisional' admission. Which meant that I had to maintain at least a C Average for the first year, Had to log a certain number of hours in one of the 'study centers' every week (Although I could technically do whatever, so I wound up reading a lot of books once I had my coursework done,) and there was a 1 hour a week pass/fail that was primarily following up on the study center logs and connecting students with extra help if the needed it.
Second, I remember a -lot- of people pledging a fraternity their first semester, and statistically it seemed to cause a much higher fail rate... In fact, I tried pledging a social fraternity my second year, dropped out in less than a week because I realized the time commitments and requirements would have tanked my grades; sure enough out of the entire group that didn't drop out, less than 10% survived through the full year.
That second point actually got so bad that, for my last year they actually banned Social fraternities from recruiting first semester freshmen... not sure whether it stuck or not after I graduated tho.
"Our findings reveal that gradeless learning can increase motivation and reduce surface learning but has no significant effect on students’ later academic achievements."
If college is supposed to prepare kids for the real world, we should be creating environments that simulate the real world as much as possible.
Creating a consequence free semester is the polar opposite of how the real world works. In the real world, you get a job, and you're on probation for your "first semester" when the scrutiny is at its highest. You don't get the privilege of easing into the job, you're thrown in. Shouldn't be any different for college kids.
The safety bubble we're building around kids + young adults is not going to end well.
Genuine take: maybe it would be more efficient for the economy and society, as well as better for everyone involved individuall, to make room for the ease in period as well, with a clearly communicated end towards the same, so people can acclimatize?
Speaking as someone who grew up in a slightly more cruel world, but still received way more kindness than previous generations (did not die of previously deadly respiratory complications in childhood, got accepted into gifted children program for enthousiasm, not IQ, got recommendation letters for the same reasons, short sighted, ADHD) in my self evaluation, each time I got a break it spurned me to work harder and try more to "pay it back", and every time I powered through strict evaluation and scrutiny it left scars that overall impede my productivity/would do so if I had not gotten therapy to overcome them .
Nature is cruel, but also inefficient. We have long since started building a "rela world" full of safety bubbles that let us thrive. Why not continue with this one?
The majority of US jobs are offered by small businesses.
The idea of “ease in” periods is nice, but it’s incredibly challenging when the business is understaffed (and hence hiring) for a specific role. You don’t have a lot of extra bandwidth on the existing team to cover for the new guy while he settles in.
> If college is supposed to prepare kids for the real world, we should be creating environments that simulate the real world as much as possible.
Would you take a motorcycle safety course where the first thing they do is chuck you into "simulated" traffic? It feels too obvious to say, but just throwing people in the deep-end isn't necessarily the most consistent or effective teaching tool for every situation.
Starting your first semester in college shouldn't feel like "being thrown in the deep end". You just spent 4 years of high school preparing for it!
But I agree that kids are awfully unprepared for the real world, so maybe coddling kids into early adulthood is unfortunately necessary? The whole situation makes me very sad.
You don't actually have any idea how different high school and college are, do you? Unless the kid went to boarding school, the environmental change is immense.
I never went through school of any level that tried honestly to prepare me for real world (TM). Absurd academic directions, insisting on stuff that basically nobody ever used regardless of job later, ROTA ad nauseum. Where is communication, some basic psychology, leading, team work, stress management and so on, which is what each of us needs desperately every day? Or ie taxation and social/medical systems, to which each of us exposed extremely directly?
It should be the mission of every school, but somehow they all missed that. Given, teachers were often abysmal themselves in these topics, but things can be learned just like other stuff.
This has the knock-on effect that it becomes impossible to excel in your first semester.
Both of my kids worked hard and were prepared for college, and they did very well their first years, as they were used to the pace and level of information. It's something they are proud of, and it gave them confidence in their future lives. By eliminating the chance to excel, we make life worse for students who should be standing out.
I struggled my freshman year. In high school, I never had to study or do much of anything outside of class. College was a huge adjustment. My high school also had an experimental math program that didn’t help anything. I’m a decent test taker, so I placed into classes my high school did not prepare me for.
My GPA being low, but not failing, gave me the wake up call I needed to make the needed adjustments. A “Pass” wouldn’t have given me that wake up call, and a “Fail” may have just bounced me out, not giving me the chance to right the ship.
Kids can absolutely still excel. This just means their "excellence" isn't reduced to a 1-dimensional score. Excelling by writing a phenomenal essay that you still think about or creating a relationship with a professor that stays with you beyond the class is probably an even more meaningful way to excel than achieving some test score
> This has the knock-on effect that it becomes impossible to excel in your first semester.
No, it eliminates the grade and GPA award for excelling. You can still excel, unless you absolutely require external validation for your work. And even then, it's still college, professors notice top performers even if they aren't giving them an A+++++ and have to give them a Pass instead.
In my opinion you are under-appreciating the external validation. Removing grades disincentives excelling. Why work any harder than getting a "pass"?
At the larger schools (like Michigan), professors (if a professor is actually grading the class, and not an adjunct or grad student) are hardly going to remember individual performances on freshman exams, or even pay much attention.
This is one semester, not all, and they still will be getting individual marks (necessary to determine final grade). They can excel if they want to, and they'll have external signals if that's what they need. It just won't be reflected in their GPA for that semester. Oh no, the horror.
The stated reason for doing this seems suspicious. A pass/fail dynamic would likely maintain student anxiety, if not increase it.
What I think is more likely is that this move will help them hire less qualified teachers and reduce administrative oversight as now they no longer have to worry about all the issues that come with grading, such as consistency, or the grades accurately reflecting performance. The quality of curriculum will likely drop significantly and this will be reflected in the student’s second year grades.
Hire less qualified teachers, move to even larger class sizes with less support, and move more teachers into administrative roles, furthering the decline of education.
> A pass/fail dynamic would likely maintain student anxiety, if not increase it.
Pass/fail means that whatever was a C before is going to be passing now. It lowers expectations compared to the previous grading scheme (in that a C no longer has a serious impact on your GPA, you still pass). If the majority of the students are getting a C or better, the majority of students would get a passing mark.
I would have anxiety if I was a first year student who wanted to transfer out to another school or program and not know if my 'pass' would be sufficient to get prior recognition of learning or advanced standing.
The resolution to this anxiety, like for all transfer students, is to contact the academic advisors at your next institution and work with them. That's what I did, I had taken a break to work during college and when I returned it was to a new institution. I sat down with one of the advisors and worked out what transferred, what didn't, and what paperwork was needed so I didn't have to take 1st year courses that I already knew but didn't have a clear correspondence to past academics. For instance, linear algebra was mostly covered in my calculus 2 course previously, but was a separate required course at that institution. The advisor discussed it with me (he was a math professor, almost all the advisors were professors) and was satisfied I knew it well enough, I just had to take a different math course to get sufficient math credits but it was a substitution.
Michigan also dropped their mandate for ACT / SAT to obtain admission. So, yes, I would say that's pretty broken. Combined with systematic grade inflation American universities as a whole are removing any real feedback about student preparation, level of effort, or ability.
The UC system and many other of the top universities in the country have also stopped looking at SAT scores.
Growing up with no one in my family having gone to college I had no idea how any of this stuff worked or anybody to tell me its important. Eventually I moved to a middle class suburb and saw kids hire private tutors for it. Meanwhile I remember 2 days before I had mine scheduled and had to find someone to beg to drive me there. I'm quite thankful that universities acknowledge how silly it is to assess a student's aptitudes from a single test score like that.
I think personal essays and a more holistic assessment is a great alternative but I'm worried about the LLM age and the limits it introduces to that as well. Perhaps interviews are the future. It would certainly better prepare students for the real world
Caltech, too. It was the entire first year when I was there but they have since changed to to the first two terms then normal grades for third term.
However, Caltech and MIT have a reason for this that probably doesn't apply to a large (35000 undergraduate) public university like UM.
Caltech, MIT, and UM all have incoming classes that did very well in high school. Around 88% of the UM class was in the top 10% of high school. It is 96+% for Caltech and MIT.
At all three most students will be going from having been one of the top students at every school they have attended to a school where they are more average. This drop on average will be bigger at Caltech and MIT because their students are clustered more tightly toward the top of their high school class.
Another thing that makes the drop bigger at Caltech (and MIT?) is that UM has a way more flexible schedule. For example if you take physics in your first year, they have I believe three different courses for that. One if for people majoring in life sciences and emphasizes the physics most useful in those areas. Another is for engineers and others doing practical applications. It is more rigorous. The third is for physics majors.
Compare to Caltech. First, there is no "if you take physics". It is a first year requirement. Second, there is just one course. Go to Caltech to major in English (which does occasionally happen! [1]) and your first year you are taking the same required physics and math courses that people there for physics and math are taking. Third, because admissions specifically looked for people with very strong math/science ability, the professors don't have to slow down. Those courses cram a lot into a short time compared to even the courses meant for people majoring in their subject at less specialized schools.
The net effect is that for a top high school student Caltech and MIT are much bigger academic shocks than UM because even though at UM you can find comparable courses structural differences due to its size and its much bigger number of students mean it doesn't make you take a bunch of rigorous courses right from the start at an insane pace.
[1] It is rare. The reasons some have done it include:
• They intend to be science writers or science journalists.
• They intend to go to medical school. Medical school admissions committees like English majors and they like a hard science background.
• They intend to go to law school. An English major with a serious hard science education and a law degree is a good fit for patent law or for going into science policy work.
On the one hand, this is good for people who need time to adapt to college. It's a big change, especially for young people who are living apart from family for the first time. You have to adapt to living alone AND an entirely new social environment AND a much more independent/rigorous academic environment all at once.
On the other, it may just delay the same result. If someone knows their first semester doesn't really count, they may not put in the time to adapt, then crash out anyway in the second semester when it becomes real. I also feel our society tries a little too hard to insulate young people from failure, and I wonder whether that means people avoid learning important lessons earlier.
I guess the biggest advantage is it lets someone spread the growth out over a little more time rather than getting railroaded at once. This approach is probably most useful for someone who is genuinely trying and struggling, rather than for someone who is not really putting in any effort. It's probably better to help the former, so overall it's probably a reasonable approach.
I think there's a way to make it work. If you do poorly first semester, you go on academic probation and must improve by your second semester or you are suspended for the next fall. If you successfully get off academic probation at the end of second semester, you can drop those freshman fall grades. Same with suspension but either way, you must have one successful semester under your belt to drop that first semester.
I did really well my freshman year and managed to get deans list. Then I transfered to a much more rigorous school and didn't do well. I didn't enjoy my major, I was living in a house far from campus with three other guys I didn't know and didn't really have any shared interests with. By spring, I was on academic probation. I lived like a hermit and wasn't going to class much or studying hard. I was pretty depressed and my undiagnosed ADHD didn't help. I did have some highschool friends at that school but I hadn't seen them in a while so it was hard making the effort to see them. I got on academic suspension at the end of my second year and had to take my next fall off. I waited the whole summer until I had come back to school to tell my parents because I was so ashamed. I remember my dad was trying to figure out why he hadn't gotten a tuition bill yet and called the bursar office while we were at the beach in August. They couldn't say why he hadn't gotten a bill yet so he handed the phone to me and the lady on the other end is saying "you need to tell them you're suspended." That was a gut punch. I was actually suicidal at this point but I kept it together until I wrote them a long email saying how bad things were. My dad visited me and convinced me to see a therapist. This ended up getting me an ADHD diagnosis and a prescription for Adderall. I stayed in my room a lot of that suspended fall semester but I did join a club sport (while lying about my eligibility as a full time student) which lead to making some friends. When I came back the next spring semester under a new major, I felt ready to crush it and I did. I stayed for the summer and crushed some more classes. I moved in with a friend and got along great with those guys. I was also right next to campus so there was no excuse to missing classes. I met my wife and made a huge turn around. But, those grades from my sophmore year were an albatross around my neck. They ruined my GPA. My in-major GPA was decent but I was still graduating with a 2.6 (freshman year grades didn't apply since they were transfer credits). Luckily, my parents had helped me get internships and my wife's father got me in for an interview at my current employer so GPA wasn't a huge burden to employment.
I really wish I could have dropped any of those sophmore grades. Obviously this policy wouldn't have helped me but I can certainly understand how it could help.
Some people are really, really invested in their grades. I had a sophomore advisee once come to my office hours begging for me to regrade their final because it landed them at a B+ in the class. They told me it was their first B+ their entire life and they started crying and throwing a fit. This person was ostensibly a grown-ass adult. After that I now always have a third person in the room with me when meeting to discuss final grades.
I don't think this no grades first-semester is the right call, but at least they are responding to this pressure that I think is coming from outside of the university. Students come in with the importance of these grades drilled in. Maybe they can spend that semester trying to tell the students grades aren't everything, especially after school is over.
You can get into our university with Bs but for some reason a B is unacceptable to many of our students, to the point they will fight and cry over them, it's not healthy. U of Michigan didn't teach them that, it was taught to them before they got there, so U of Michigan is just responding how they can.
In the US the problem starts in late middle school/early high school. For whatever reason, not having a remedial high school and not giving teachers the authority to push underperforming students to such high schools causes problems.
> Better than lowering grading standards, I guess.
But both are done. Grading inflation is very real.
The problem is not specific to US uni: in many western EU countries education level is going down the drain at a totally alarming rate. We're talking about kids coming out of primary school and arriving at secondary school with "good grades" although they can barely write, even in their native language.
An official report from the OECD is saying stuff like: "29% of 15-year-old French students failed to reach Level 2 (the baseline level of basic proficiency needed to participate fully in modern society) in mathematics.". We're talking about nearly 1 in 3 people that cannot add and subtract numbers.
And it's not specific to France. It's the same in other western countries. Education in the west is going down the drain while students in Singapore, Japan, China, etc. are hard at work.
People are going to say it's "inhumane" to not grade-inflate. That we should let students pass the first semester without grades. But why stop there? Why not let students who cannot write, cannot add numbers, get their diploma? Neuro-surgeons? Plane pilots? Why not just pick people randomly in the population and assign them a role in society? No more math/physics/chemistry in first year of medicine: anyone can be a doctor.
Really: where do you draw the line? Why stop after that first semester?
It's Idiocracy. And people left and right, just like most in this thread, explaining how all the ideas that let to this state of affair are wonderful ideas that makes lot of sense because school/college/uni is "too difficult psychologically".
The little precious snowflakes, we need to cuddle them.
Huh, I never considered that grades might be intended to help the person learning. I always assumed they were just intended as a signal to the rest of the world that they had learned something.
I think that's possibly one of the main problems with grades and why they inevitably lead to the grade inflation crisis. From the article:
> In May, Harvard University faculty voted to approve a 20% cap on the number of A’s per undergraduate course in an effort to curb grade inflation. It won’t apply to A-minuses, which committee members predicted would become the most awarded grade.
> At the University of Michigan, a review by the news site MLive found that 74.1% of all undergraduate grades in 2022 were an A+, A or A-. A decade earlier, that percentage was 57.6%.
For the most part, the only people that see the grades are you, your parents, your teacher, and maybe your friends. Most of the world will just see a pass/fail result (degree or not), unless you also earn special awards.
Yeah, the students are being graded like meat. It's not for the cow's sake, it's for the consumer. I say this as someone who had to maintain a set gpa through to keep a scholarship.
I was about to post the same; they adopted the pass/fail first semester policy in 1971.
But then I was just horrified to read apparently they got rid of that system in 2017 [1], and now it's a normal letter grade?! Assuming that Hopkins still skews quite harshly on grading, that's an awful regression.
Having put two kids through college now: this makes sense. First semester grades are a shitshow anyways, and aren't especially predictive. The first semester at an R1 is utterly unlike any ordinary high school experience and a lot of what you're measuring is just kids getting their sea legs. What's the point? If it's causing drama, just get rid of it.
Maybe. Maybe not. In my case, that first semester of near-failing grades was the kick in the pants I needed to start exerting myself. I entered college assuming it was just as easy as high school. It wasn't. Not even close. And a semester of pass/fail wouldn't have taught me that lesson because I did pass, just barely.
I was initially thinking they were being too coddling, but you're right, my first semester grades weren't all that good either. I was working hard, but it takes a lot to adapt to the much higher expectations of a decent uni.
They aren't a meaningful signal for how capable a person is by the end of the program. But maybe the fix would be to not count them towards the GPA/permanent transcript, while still providing the achieved grade to the students so they have a measure of how they did.
Do you see this as a self management issue or a course intensity issue.
My anecdotal experience with the University of California system was that course load was a step down from Highschool university prep (which wasn't that bad). Classes were easier than their AP counterparts, and most students who struggled had an issue with attending morning classes after late nights socializing.
My impression from family going through this process now is that the high school prep has only gotten more intense, so what is the gap? Has college gotten significantly harder in the last 20 years?
I've worked in colleges for 2 decades. It's rarely purely academic issues that cause bad grades, in my experience.
It's everything else with self regulation. Where most college prep goes wrong is at home, in not allowing appropriate agency for the child to make decisions before college. When you go from having to ask to go to the bathroom to being entirely independent in 2 months, bad shit happens.
This lesson has held true everywhere I've worked, from small junior colleges to D1 state schools.
Subsequently, college has gotten harder, but so has k-12, so proportionately, no it's not more difficult now
It's been a while since I was in college, but mine gave the bare minimum credit hours (3 classes) to qualify as a full time student and the classes were brain-dead easy. That seemed like a good compromise to get students used to the college life.
Companies don't expect interns or new graduates to perform at the level of a senior engineer. They expect and plan that they have to ease them into the "professional workforce" somewhat.
Anyways, the biggest tech companies in Michigan are automakers, Dow chemicals, and Whirlpool. These are all respectable places and have different expectations than X or OpenAI or companies like that.
That is an excellent book that describes the changes higher education is facing in its students around 2014-2018. I have read it about a year ago.
They really ought to do a follow up for 2026. From what I gather talking to faculty and professors, this problem became noticeably worse since COVID and the years following. A follow up book or study would be very interesting to read.
No one's mentioning it, but also the disease factor.
I remember the first semester in the dorms was mostly the sound of coughing.
Building up the immune system takes disease exposure and that takes time.
Addnib all the immune system depressants and increased exposure events there at Michigan - booze, pot, late nights, hookups, crowds, stress, etc - and you get a perfect storm for the immune system to take a beating.
Our professor assigned us to write a fast fourier transform, and when we had class next week apparently everyone claimed that it was too difficult so he changed the assignment to "find an implementation online and write about it"
I feel really grateful I graduated before the advent of LLMs because it was really easy to stand out as a good student when the standards are apparently so low.
Side tangent but in the same class he caught people zero-citation copy-pasting from Wikipedia on the papers we were assigned to write, and the guys acted like they had no idea you couldn't do that.
That's the big thing - the college might be dropping the first semester grades so they can squeeze a second semester of tuition out of kids.
What they are trying to do is keep the kids that would otherwise do well but might freak out in the first semester. Seems pretty fine to me especially since those are grades that if we are being honest really don't matter anyways.
So what do you mean with "uncertain environment"?
What matters is your major and whether it is a well respected program.
A CS@Texas student will have the ability to open the exact same doors professionally and prestige wise than a CS@Brown student.
You have Ivies, Ivy Tier Privates (Stanford, Chicago, Duke, USC, Caltech, MIT, NYU, Northwestern), and Public Ivies (Cal, UCLA, UCSD, Mich, UIUC, UW, UT, GT, Purdue, UNC Chapel Hill, UVA) that all recruit the same kind of applicant.
Kids will take multiple APs (taking 10+ isn't unheard of), do multiple extracurriculars (debate, MUN, DECA sports, academic olympiads, theatre), volunteering (NHS, CSF, etc), and even take college classes in high school.
On top of that while tests are optional, most students still submit their SAT and ACT, and the expectation of 1500+ and 35+ still holds.
And even then there's no guarantee you'll get in.
Most applicants who successfully get into Ivies, impacted majors with single digit acceptance rates at Mich or Cal tier programs like EECS or a BBA, and other peer programs are basically burnt out by 17-18 (the age most kids at these programs now matriculate).
And the first semester is not impactful in any shape or form. It's best to take summary and intro classes as P/NP to even the playing field and then throw in a weed-out class (in CS that was historically data structures or OS).
So many HNers complain about how the younger generation is hyper-competitive yet when universities start taking steps to help reduce that they start kvetching.
Heck, with my profile from the late 2000s and early 2010s (right when everything became hyper-competitive and optimized), I actually wouldn't have a shot at most programs at Mich especially when I compare it to my sibling's profile who also attended a Mich tier engineering undergrad.
This had pros and cons:
- it was nice to have a bit more of a gradual build
- this would probably avoid some of the issues here
- if you are lazy like me: you do bare minimum effort first and second year and then get crushed by both workload and lack of foundational knowledge in third year
- if you apply to a US company, some will want to see your “full transcript” and don’t accept “I was too busy playing CS (Counterstrike) to study CS (Computer Science)”
From my kid's experience: she was up at 6:30am, in AP classes by 7:30am (three more to go during the day). Classes were done by 3:00, then sports practice until 5:00. Gotta have that activity on your college application, not counting other volunteering and clubs in the open spaces. Then homework after dinner until 10:00 or so, sometimes much later. Homework assigned over weekends. Homework assigned over breaks.
That's 15+ hours a day, every weekday, for an entire school year. Then you have test prep (APs and the ACT/SAT), college applications, writing essays and scholarship applications, college tours, sorting decisions, financial aid applications, etc etc etc. And now her college already has a few hours of orientation videos stacked up for her to watch before she moves in.
Personally, I don't blame her if she checks out for a few weeks. Or a semester.
Still baffles me why is that even a thing that's considered at the colleges. I thought it was just a relic of Soviet past but no, apparently it exists in the US and other first world countries as well for some strange reason.
We are making the kids endure that out of fear of their college, but stats don't back up the grind they make the kids do.
My neighborhood and social circle have a number of high school age children, some aiming for high ranking universities.
None of them have these grueling 15 hour day schedules you’re describing.
I don’t even know of a high school around me that starts at 7:30AM.
What universities are you targeting with such an extreme schedule?
> she was up at 6:30am, in AP classes by 7:30am (three more to go during the day). Classes were done by 3:00, then sports practice until 5:00.
In other States, high school starts later like 8:45/9am. You can take classes online and start school later if you want or do dual enrollment and skip later periods.
> Gotta have that activity on your college application, not counting other volunteering and clubs in the open spaces.
Mine worked and were in clubs. Kids are remarkably resilient. In some States, work time counts in lieu of volunteer time.
> Then you have test prep (APs and the ACT/SAT), college applications, writing essays and scholarship applications, college tours, sorting decisions, financial aid applications, etc etc etc. And now her college already has a few hours of orientation videos stacked up for her to watch before she moves in.
This sounds like a lot of undue pressure. UCF didn’t make you do that. ACT or SAT works and you have a couple years to do it. Not all at once in Senior year and you usually can composite your score across the highest tests.
Then the never-ending pressure of midterms, finals, and regents exams.
Is it possible that the kids who have to study very very long hours to get a GPA decent enough to get into college are just not that sharp?
Comparable adult parent things would be up at 6am, prep kids for school day, in the office by 8am, 8 hours of work plus a lunch, departing the office around 5pm, transporting kids to/from some activities, dinner, helping kids with homework, somehow fit in regular shopping needs (food, essentials, etc), maybe some volunteering or hobby things, if lucky in bed by 10pm, and we're easily at 15 hours of "work" on a weekday.
Yes, it's a lot.
Very challenging at times, but for example I sleep with my kid hugging me, or I chat with them while in the car, or we do chores while watching tv or something like that. And not every day is packed like that, you can tell your kids "no more than 3 times per week of activties, the other 2 days are for playdates", and that should be acceptable.
There are horrible days of the week, but it's not daily 15 hours of work. That's training for slavery.
Homework for break and homework for weekend should be STRONGLY ILLEGAL.
That is a weird (modern?) delusion. Without children, our species disappears in <100 years. And the last of those years would be painful for those still alive.
Those who are having and raising children are the ones doing the most for the next generation.
It wasn’t saying that children are hobbies. It’s saying that time spent with children is enjoyable and time spent with them is not an enjoyable chore.
while I work, my wife can do the shopping and take care of other household chores if needed.
What most people can’t afford is to maintain their desired lifestyle and only have one parent working. It’s similar to how people earning 3-4X the median wages for an area will think they’re barely getting by, while someone earning 1/4 of what they do is raising a family with two kids.
If you work in tech, this is possible. It's gonna suck, and you'll feel poor relative to your peers, but it's entirely possible.
You’re competing apples and oranges. Getting into a top college is similar to grinding to get into Big Tech jobs and then climb the ladder there.
Good colleges are easy. The top few colleges are very hard.
> The real world is Pass/Fail, much to the chagrin of plenty of HNers.
If by “fail” you mean lose your job in the next round of layoffs and have your career derailed, possibly.
You’re still comparing apples and oranges. The people who compete for top college spots usually continue competing for promotions and better paying jobs. The people who coast through high school look for jobs where they can coast and then get comfortable with whatever salary that provides them.
I have several hobbies that are popular with kids (mountain biking, rock climbing, and some others).
I can assure you that there are plenty of kids with more time than I have to dedicate to these hobbies at every popular spot I go to. Many of them are ambitious, smart, and working toward top universities, too. It’s actually fun energy to be around.
The parent comment about students getting up at 6:30AM and working 15 hour days is highly unusual.
The fact is that they aren't working extra, not for a job anyway. The extra work comes in the time making dried beans instead of buying canned, in repairing stuff poorly, in shopping around for a doctor that takes the state health insurance or an affordable option if you have none at all, in taking busses (if they are available), and other unpaid things. Your child will be lucky to afford the activities that gets them a 'good' education, especially if they have to work.
That is exactly OP's point: for OP, if a child's "working hours" includes university prep and resume-padding sports activities, then an adult's "working hours" includes housework, grocery shopping, dealing with insurance and taxes, and commute/family chauffeur time.
And for the record, I had to work less to get to good school back then.
Pressure makes diamonds, but it also crushes everything else.
Overcoming hard times absolutely made me a better person, but as I've grown I've seen many examples of the fallout you're referring to. Sometimes people just break.
Meanwhile, the state school down the road is a fraction the cost, teaches a lot of the same content, and will accept anyone with a pulse. In my state, at least. State universities are somewhat competitive to get into, but state colleges... wide open.
All of which is very real-world. Certain top firms recruit only top candidates. Everyone else works somewhere further along the spectrum.
As a non-US person who's worked for a bunch of US companies, my belief is that the Ivy League et al act as a class system, rather than a symbol of educational attainment.
This goes against the stereotypes you read online, but many of them are motivated by a desire to sneer and cut down others’ achievements. Look up “tall poppy syndrome” for one phrase describing this phenomenon.
While HN, VCs, SJSU, and Tech are obviously not composed of the same population or applying the same restrictions, it’s certainly reasonable to highlight one similarity: the potential glory of one’s role at work directly impacts how competitive it is. That we’re currently in a nightmarish layoff cycle due to the ZIRP bubble popping and due to businesses replacing costly (and glorious) creative roles with more economical PREs (prompt reliability engineers) is amplifying this effect more strongly in Tech than in other industries, because Tech — just like the Investing industry that’s underpinned it for so long — has been saturated with glory and competitiveness.
I spent my career in tech working in the roles that do not offer glory — IT, rather than Product; Cost Centers, rather than Profit Centers — but even within IT, there were a couple of roles that had more glory and were much more competitive in their selection and evaluation criteria than others. At my final IT job, we were less strict about credentials and competitiveness with directors and vice presidents than we were about the high-glory role of enterprise architect. So while I do empathize with HN’s bias, having myself once pursued glory in tech, such competitiveness is abnormal in most jobs in most fields.
This might be news to many people. Or do you mean it’s not too difficult to get a new job at Walmart?
I myself went through mediocre noname university in eastern Europe with OK grades and it didn't matter at all, now I get perm salary thats better than 99% of devs in whole Europe while doing just that and nothing more, while sporting 10 weeks of paid vacation yearly. Quality of life further down the line, success and happiness are extremely non-correlated with all this academic stuff.
Its just control freak helicopter parents, which, albeit with good underlying intentions, fuck up everything they touch, including mental health of their kids. So kids compete just to endlessly compete while winning less than nothing. This is how deep regrets later in life are made.
Nor would I, but I'd also accept that she did so and failed a few classes.
Just like I did in the 90s. Although in my case it wasn't burn-out, but system shock at actually having to try to get good grades (Fairfax County PS then UVA).
Did that bombed first semester probably eliminate med school or an elite graduate program? Sure. But I probably wasn't cut out for either anyway. And it was a kick in the pants and got me to pay attention and work.
Michigan and its apologists here would rob these kids of real-world experience, reducing them to infants. And then we're all disappointed when these adults act like infants.
Some of those students have 40 hour jobs, some night shift, that they can't skip or else they don't have a home or school anymore. Others have kids that can't be neglected.
It is fun when it is fun, when you can skip it or do it purely because you want to. If you go to sports club because you have to, it is work and not fun.
If you go volunteer or have to join the club for college application, they become work. They are not fun stuff.
> Time spent in gym class and lunch is not work
Gym class is work. Kids are not there voluntarily.
You come in and do what you are told. You don't chat with friends or play around, you focus on whatever trainer told you to focus at. You dont do what you want to do, but what trainer thinks will make you more performant. And if it hurts or you are tired or just really want to do something else, you still do it.
The biggest problem wasn't the workload itself, but how inefficient learning was back then. It was the early days of the Internet, no coursera, no Google indexed uni sites, no LLMs, no online tutors. I only had a mediocre textbook and some notes I borrowed from friends when I couldn't attend lectures or labs. It took ages. I’d burn hours trying to parse two paragraphs in the textbook, only to ask mates who didn't understand it either.
Now, we have an incredible amount of information & tech at our fingertips: LLMs, Google NotebookLM, online tutors, dozens of textbooks, and sites like Anna's Archive packed with high-quality "free" material. With all this technology, the time it takes to understand, prepare, and master a topic is a fraction of what it used to be. It still takes work and discipline, but man... you can feed textbooks into an LLM and use targeted prompts to debug your exact knowledge gaps on the practice test you get from the LLM.
So I reckon it's easier now than before, simply because learning can be done so much more efficiently. After all these years, I still remember the hardest classes and the most stringent professors with great affection - even though I hated those bastards back then. My Group Theory prof once invalidated a definition I wrote because of a single missing word. At the time, I thought it was an injustice, but later I realized that word was crucial.
University is where young people must face hard work and reality, because it teaches them what true meritocracy is. It should be hard, it's the same way a gym workout should be hard or it’s ineffective.
In my experience, many freshmen treated their first year as a gap year anyways, especially if they took difficult senior classes. First year classes aren’t always as rigorous as good AP classes (depending on both the high school and the university), so you can skip or cram while partying.
I think the quantity was reasonable, except too much busywork, I wish I could replace it with subjects I was passionate about (i.e. tech).
I also had the entire summer between senior year and college to decompress.
Nowadays I hear that most public schools are giving less work. With all due respect, I believe GP is an anomaly and/or it wasn't the school, but their own pressure.
No, this isn't every high school student. But there are more people in the group I describe than there are in the group you describe.
Here's my point: There is a lot of ground between the two extremes. And both ends of the spectrum are making it into college of some sort. So it you think your child is under too much stress from taking seven AP classes, drop four of them. If they are overwhelmed by tennis practice, ... maybe recognize that removing all friction from a person's life is not necessarily a good thing. Work together to build coping skills. But no child has to be an Olympic medalist neurosurgeon senator CEO all at the same time. Who is "forcing" that on high school students? You?
There is plenty of room for people with 3.2 GPAs and only two AP classes when they graduate. Frankly, with some family support, it is not that hard to have a 3.8 GPA for 60+% of students.
But I've seen high school valedictorians with 3.9 college GPAs graduate and struggle to find a white collar job. What is the plan for that from U Mich?
they've optimized for a highly stratified educational environment. The real world don't work like that.
Unless you stay in academia no one cares about your GPA 2 years after you leave.
I did everything you mentioned in the nineties and aughts (my sport was year round and coach expected us to travel on our own dime to tournaments that lasted the entire weekend at least four times in the summer, and during the school year I was out of town most Sat-Sun at tournaments, which take way more time than the couple hours a volleyball game lasts or whatever), and volunteer activities that lasted until 10pm for a few week stretches a few times a year.
I had a blast doing things I loved. Counting travel, 30+ hours a week of sports. School from 6:30 to 3:30 (because I took an extra AP physics class that happened before school officially started). I acted in community theatre. I did martial arts. I quit tennis to teach acting for the YMCA my senior year.
Why doesn't your kid love the sport she plays? Why doesn't she love the volunteer activities? Those are meant to be FUN. Like, that's why the colleges want them: to see why she's an interesting person, not a time-management robot. They can tell these things, so stop gaming the system ad find a hobby she'll be so obsessed with that she'll write a college entrance essay all about how it made her a more interesting person.
There is no adcom in the world that is trying to find a selfless 17yo who does drudgery because it's expected of them. They're trying to find people who LOVE building for Habitat, who want to be chefs and serve at a soup kitchen, who LOVE God and ran tech support during COVID for their church livestream, etc.
Is that what it’s about? Keep in that the University of Michigan is a public university, explicitly founded to “provide the inhabitants of this state with the means of acquiring a thorough knowledge of the various branches of literature, science, and the arts.” There’s nothing about being elite in there at all. This is an institution that serves the public.
I’m no stranger to long hours to achieve high status—I’m a professor. But I also started my journey at a public school and a public undergraduate institution. Many of my friends—all good and smart people but in many cases decidedly NOT elite-have leveraged their public education into satisfying careers. I, and my friends, would not have had our opportunities otherwise. I simply could not afford top private school.
I don’t know what to think about this change exactly, but it’s worth pointing out that MIT has had this policy for first year students since 1968. MIT! Seems like UM can make this work if they are thoughtful about it.
And yes, certainly a (traditional) university education should not be required for having good career opportunities.
IMO there's a need for a type of education that's vastly more scalable and still equips people with the beyond-secondary education they need to be productive in today's economy.
Competitive universities are competitive. Sometimes that competiton is justified and sometimes it is unjustifiably based on pedigree. The program I attended before getting my PhD at a public university was at a well-known private university. But in terms of research productivity and impact, the public university was a MUCH better place to go to school. The PhD program was exceptionally competitive but its undergrad program was not. As a result, many undergrads who wandered through our lab door got a first-class research experience.
I’m not going to pretend that pedigree doesn’t matter (to some people), but it is emphatically not the same thing as “a good preparation.” I took a couple math classes one summer at a low-tier state college. They were just as good as any math classes I took at any of the other places I went to school, public or private.
That still doesn't mean they're not "for the elites." Universities are for people striving for upward mobility, i.e. to get into or maintain membership in the elite tiers of society. Also there is (obviously) significant variation in the upper end of the elite and the lower end.
> Not sure what your point is.
Well, you said
> All universities are for the elites.
And then I countered that, actually, many are not selective. I am asking you to reconsider your statement. In reality, many college programs confer _skills_, not _status_. This narrative that colleges are for the elites is demonstrably untrue, runs counter to the founding mission of many of them, and strikes me as sour grapes. I know because I was one of the kids who struggled to afford college, went to a public one where I learned _skills_, which I then leveraged into a satisfying career.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
[2] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
What would have to change for you to declare it's not the case?
It costs ~$55k/year to educate a student at UMich. That's more than half of the median US family's income. And UMich is a massive success story. Excellent academic output at a relatively great price – but even there the actual cost would bankrupt a normal American family.
That's a lot of money to spend educating someone into a non-elite trajectory in life, no? Never mind the opportunity cost of 4 years where one could be acquiring direct skills in whatever job they're going into?
You're smart, you'll figure it out.
In return you get inflated GPAs that get you into better colleges. But if you can't figure it out on the first try? More stress.
Interestingly, a lot of colleges now ignore the 'honors' weighted GPA and ask to see the unweighted score. If you have a teen entering high school, skip the honors track and help them do better in the normal track version of the class. See if your school offers dual-credit with a local community college or state university. Those transfer credits are WAY more valuable now (and cheaper!) than an AP score, with a lot less test stress.
After emerging from an ap/ib honors program in highschool (with excellent teachers) I became increasingly stressed in college when any real simple lack of comprehension occurred. I was smort. I should "get it."
However, later in life the ideas from books or concepts we read, discussed, and critiqued (Doestevsky,Shakespeare, sophocles etc) allowed me access to ideas in the humanities that far outweighed that initial college whiplash. So it's a trade off I would certainly make again.
You'd do just as well rolling dice, and it would be more legitimate because it wouldn't be pretending to do something it doesn't.
Can you teach yourself, broadly. Out of all the filters we have in education, this one might be the most legitimate because it maps pretty closely to lifelong curiosity and learning.
Can you teach yourself, broadly. Out of all the filters we have in education, this one might be the most legitimate.
Thank goodness I didn’t need to work so hard, but I can acknowledge what a shitty system it is.
Help me understand why these children or their parents are gunning in this manner and working like dogs in this manner, to join into and propagate such a shitty system?
Universities at least apply some meritocratic standards. If we bypass universities, there will be some other gatekeeper, it will be worse: mostly an "old boys network" and corrupt, pay-to-play advancement.
When was that? Harvard was founded in 1636.
It seems very possible to me that the managers of said system are far better than ever before and still fail to produce spectacular results.
Can you explain how that's "socially unaware" or "one-dimensional"?
Why only students who got in based on ethnicity? What about students who only got in because their parents are wealthy or alumni? Or students who get in because of athletics but wouldn't otherwise meet academic admissions criteria? I don't know why there's all this focus (and pushback) on race based admissions when there are multiple other meritless avenues for students to get into college. That people focus on eliminating one and not the others is very telling.
This kind of applicant is now treated as table stakes for programs like UMich, and acceptance rates for impacted majors like CS in top programs have dropped to single digits.
It is ridiculously competitive to get into top programs now. I got into an Ivy in the late 2000s to early 2010s. With my stats from back then (13 APs all 4s and 5s, a 4.5+ GPA, varsity wrestling, JV XCountry, NHS, CSF, USAPHO, USAMO, Policy and LD debate, a 2200+ SAT, 35 ACT, 8 SAT Subject test), I would have been lucky to get into CS@UC Davis today and I absolutely wouldn't have gotten into my alma mater.
Because domestic undergrads applying to a research-oriented grad program are advised to apply directly to a PhD program.
MS/MA programs are expected to remediate deficiencies at the undergrad level, and most undergrads will take 1st year MS/MA classes as part of their senior year doing a bachelors. Alternatively, the MS/MA is awarded if a PhD candidate failed Quals.
Outside the US, the expected path is BA/BSc/BEng/BTech to MS/MA/MTech/MPhil to PhD.
In the US, the expected path is SB/AB to PhD and MS/MA if you fail quals or are looking for a professional program to remediate coursework deficiencies.
I don’t think kids like yours are having issues but rather kids who didn’t apply themselves academically.
Basically A or even B grades cannot be an average grade. C or 2.0 would be the expected average but of course this hasn’t been close to true since GWB introduced his idiotic policy.
It’s no secret, if you let kids (or people) slack, 80 to 90% will slack off. 10 to 20% will endure out of principle or habit.
Given that 75% of all grades in 2022 were A's, grade inflation has already made the indicator value of grades pretty meaningless. I think this take from a student captures it well:
> Louth, 20 years old, said he earned all A’s and one B in his first semester and doubted he would have worked as hard had the classes been pass/fail. But he thinks he would have learned more from his classes without the pressure of earning high marks.
The first semester should help students explore and engage their curiosity. I think it's a good move and hope the experiment succeeds
The consequence though, was that every single person who stayed on the course actually cared about being there. Staying motivated for the next three and a half years was made so much easier because the first six months were so difficult.
But it's better earlier rather than later. The consequences aren't severe and you can change majors, lessen your course load, or stop those volunteer opportunities. That's part of learning how to be an adult.
I knew a few people my freshmen year that were put on academic probation. They turned out all right after making some drastic changes. Others simply disappeared during the break.
See the problem here?
There needs to be some sort of academic baseline for university otherwise what is the difference between a youtube playlist and a semester worth of credits?
I remember two things about my university.
First, I was a 'provisional' admission. Which meant that I had to maintain at least a C Average for the first year, Had to log a certain number of hours in one of the 'study centers' every week (Although I could technically do whatever, so I wound up reading a lot of books once I had my coursework done,) and there was a 1 hour a week pass/fail that was primarily following up on the study center logs and connecting students with extra help if the needed it.
Second, I remember a -lot- of people pledging a fraternity their first semester, and statistically it seemed to cause a much higher fail rate... In fact, I tried pledging a social fraternity my second year, dropped out in less than a week because I realized the time commitments and requirements would have tanked my grades; sure enough out of the entire group that didn't drop out, less than 10% survived through the full year.
That second point actually got so bad that, for my last year they actually banned Social fraternities from recruiting first semester freshmen... not sure whether it stuck or not after I graduated tho.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03075079.2023.2...
"Our findings reveal that gradeless learning can increase motivation and reduce surface learning but has no significant effect on students’ later academic achievements."
If college is supposed to prepare kids for the real world, we should be creating environments that simulate the real world as much as possible.
Creating a consequence free semester is the polar opposite of how the real world works. In the real world, you get a job, and you're on probation for your "first semester" when the scrutiny is at its highest. You don't get the privilege of easing into the job, you're thrown in. Shouldn't be any different for college kids.
The safety bubble we're building around kids + young adults is not going to end well.
Speaking as someone who grew up in a slightly more cruel world, but still received way more kindness than previous generations (did not die of previously deadly respiratory complications in childhood, got accepted into gifted children program for enthousiasm, not IQ, got recommendation letters for the same reasons, short sighted, ADHD) in my self evaluation, each time I got a break it spurned me to work harder and try more to "pay it back", and every time I powered through strict evaluation and scrutiny it left scars that overall impede my productivity/would do so if I had not gotten therapy to overcome them .
Nature is cruel, but also inefficient. We have long since started building a "rela world" full of safety bubbles that let us thrive. Why not continue with this one?
The idea of “ease in” periods is nice, but it’s incredibly challenging when the business is understaffed (and hence hiring) for a specific role. You don’t have a lot of extra bandwidth on the existing team to cover for the new guy while he settles in.
How about we work on making things not suck
Would you take a motorcycle safety course where the first thing they do is chuck you into "simulated" traffic? It feels too obvious to say, but just throwing people in the deep-end isn't necessarily the most consistent or effective teaching tool for every situation.
But I agree that kids are awfully unprepared for the real world, so maybe coddling kids into early adulthood is unfortunately necessary? The whole situation makes me very sad.
It should be the mission of every school, but somehow they all missed that. Given, teachers were often abysmal themselves in these topics, but things can be learned just like other stuff.
Both of my kids worked hard and were prepared for college, and they did very well their first years, as they were used to the pace and level of information. It's something they are proud of, and it gave them confidence in their future lives. By eliminating the chance to excel, we make life worse for students who should be standing out.
My GPA being low, but not failing, gave me the wake up call I needed to make the needed adjustments. A “Pass” wouldn’t have given me that wake up call, and a “Fail” may have just bounced me out, not giving me the chance to right the ship.
No, it eliminates the grade and GPA award for excelling. You can still excel, unless you absolutely require external validation for your work. And even then, it's still college, professors notice top performers even if they aren't giving them an A+++++ and have to give them a Pass instead.
At the larger schools (like Michigan), professors (if a professor is actually grading the class, and not an adjunct or grad student) are hardly going to remember individual performances on freshman exams, or even pay much attention.
What I think is more likely is that this move will help them hire less qualified teachers and reduce administrative oversight as now they no longer have to worry about all the issues that come with grading, such as consistency, or the grades accurately reflecting performance. The quality of curriculum will likely drop significantly and this will be reflected in the student’s second year grades.
Pass/fail means that whatever was a C before is going to be passing now. It lowers expectations compared to the previous grading scheme (in that a C no longer has a serious impact on your GPA, you still pass). If the majority of the students are getting a C or better, the majority of students would get a passing mark.
If you want to say MIT is soft. Feel free.
Growing up with no one in my family having gone to college I had no idea how any of this stuff worked or anybody to tell me its important. Eventually I moved to a middle class suburb and saw kids hire private tutors for it. Meanwhile I remember 2 days before I had mine scheduled and had to find someone to beg to drive me there. I'm quite thankful that universities acknowledge how silly it is to assess a student's aptitudes from a single test score like that.
I think personal essays and a more holistic assessment is a great alternative but I'm worried about the LLM age and the limits it introduces to that as well. Perhaps interviews are the future. It would certainly better prepare students for the real world
Which led to a spectacular failure of incoming students to do basic math, lead to massive increases in failures in first year math courses.
Maybe removing signal loses knowledge about who is ready for standard classes?
However, Caltech and MIT have a reason for this that probably doesn't apply to a large (35000 undergraduate) public university like UM.
Caltech, MIT, and UM all have incoming classes that did very well in high school. Around 88% of the UM class was in the top 10% of high school. It is 96+% for Caltech and MIT.
At all three most students will be going from having been one of the top students at every school they have attended to a school where they are more average. This drop on average will be bigger at Caltech and MIT because their students are clustered more tightly toward the top of their high school class.
Another thing that makes the drop bigger at Caltech (and MIT?) is that UM has a way more flexible schedule. For example if you take physics in your first year, they have I believe three different courses for that. One if for people majoring in life sciences and emphasizes the physics most useful in those areas. Another is for engineers and others doing practical applications. It is more rigorous. The third is for physics majors.
Compare to Caltech. First, there is no "if you take physics". It is a first year requirement. Second, there is just one course. Go to Caltech to major in English (which does occasionally happen! [1]) and your first year you are taking the same required physics and math courses that people there for physics and math are taking. Third, because admissions specifically looked for people with very strong math/science ability, the professors don't have to slow down. Those courses cram a lot into a short time compared to even the courses meant for people majoring in their subject at less specialized schools.
The net effect is that for a top high school student Caltech and MIT are much bigger academic shocks than UM because even though at UM you can find comparable courses structural differences due to its size and its much bigger number of students mean it doesn't make you take a bunch of rigorous courses right from the start at an insane pace.
[1] It is rare. The reasons some have done it include:
• They intend to be science writers or science journalists.
• They intend to go to medical school. Medical school admissions committees like English majors and they like a hard science background.
• They intend to go to law school. An English major with a serious hard science education and a law degree is a good fit for patent law or for going into science policy work.
It lets you actually focus on getting acclimated and into the groove without being worried about the difference between an A and a B.
On the one hand, this is good for people who need time to adapt to college. It's a big change, especially for young people who are living apart from family for the first time. You have to adapt to living alone AND an entirely new social environment AND a much more independent/rigorous academic environment all at once.
On the other, it may just delay the same result. If someone knows their first semester doesn't really count, they may not put in the time to adapt, then crash out anyway in the second semester when it becomes real. I also feel our society tries a little too hard to insulate young people from failure, and I wonder whether that means people avoid learning important lessons earlier.
I guess the biggest advantage is it lets someone spread the growth out over a little more time rather than getting railroaded at once. This approach is probably most useful for someone who is genuinely trying and struggling, rather than for someone who is not really putting in any effort. It's probably better to help the former, so overall it's probably a reasonable approach.
I did really well my freshman year and managed to get deans list. Then I transfered to a much more rigorous school and didn't do well. I didn't enjoy my major, I was living in a house far from campus with three other guys I didn't know and didn't really have any shared interests with. By spring, I was on academic probation. I lived like a hermit and wasn't going to class much or studying hard. I was pretty depressed and my undiagnosed ADHD didn't help. I did have some highschool friends at that school but I hadn't seen them in a while so it was hard making the effort to see them. I got on academic suspension at the end of my second year and had to take my next fall off. I waited the whole summer until I had come back to school to tell my parents because I was so ashamed. I remember my dad was trying to figure out why he hadn't gotten a tuition bill yet and called the bursar office while we were at the beach in August. They couldn't say why he hadn't gotten a bill yet so he handed the phone to me and the lady on the other end is saying "you need to tell them you're suspended." That was a gut punch. I was actually suicidal at this point but I kept it together until I wrote them a long email saying how bad things were. My dad visited me and convinced me to see a therapist. This ended up getting me an ADHD diagnosis and a prescription for Adderall. I stayed in my room a lot of that suspended fall semester but I did join a club sport (while lying about my eligibility as a full time student) which lead to making some friends. When I came back the next spring semester under a new major, I felt ready to crush it and I did. I stayed for the summer and crushed some more classes. I moved in with a friend and got along great with those guys. I was also right next to campus so there was no excuse to missing classes. I met my wife and made a huge turn around. But, those grades from my sophmore year were an albatross around my neck. They ruined my GPA. My in-major GPA was decent but I was still graduating with a 2.6 (freshman year grades didn't apply since they were transfer credits). Luckily, my parents had helped me get internships and my wife's father got me in for an interview at my current employer so GPA wasn't a huge burden to employment.
I really wish I could have dropped any of those sophmore grades. Obviously this policy wouldn't have helped me but I can certainly understand how it could help.
I don't think this no grades first-semester is the right call, but at least they are responding to this pressure that I think is coming from outside of the university. Students come in with the importance of these grades drilled in. Maybe they can spend that semester trying to tell the students grades aren't everything, especially after school is over.
You can get into our university with Bs but for some reason a B is unacceptable to many of our students, to the point they will fight and cry over them, it's not healthy. U of Michigan didn't teach them that, it was taught to them before they got there, so U of Michigan is just responding how they can.
But this also seems like it is just kicking the can down the road.
https://ro.umich.edu/sites/default/files/calendar/pdfs/Cal_2...
But both are done. Grading inflation is very real.
The problem is not specific to US uni: in many western EU countries education level is going down the drain at a totally alarming rate. We're talking about kids coming out of primary school and arriving at secondary school with "good grades" although they can barely write, even in their native language.
An official report from the OECD is saying stuff like: "29% of 15-year-old French students failed to reach Level 2 (the baseline level of basic proficiency needed to participate fully in modern society) in mathematics.". We're talking about nearly 1 in 3 people that cannot add and subtract numbers.
And it's not specific to France. It's the same in other western countries. Education in the west is going down the drain while students in Singapore, Japan, China, etc. are hard at work.
People are going to say it's "inhumane" to not grade-inflate. That we should let students pass the first semester without grades. But why stop there? Why not let students who cannot write, cannot add numbers, get their diploma? Neuro-surgeons? Plane pilots? Why not just pick people randomly in the population and assign them a role in society? No more math/physics/chemistry in first year of medicine: anyone can be a doctor.
Really: where do you draw the line? Why stop after that first semester?
It's Idiocracy. And people left and right, just like most in this thread, explaining how all the ideas that let to this state of affair are wonderful ideas that makes lot of sense because school/college/uni is "too difficult psychologically".
The little precious snowflakes, we need to cuddle them.
> In May, Harvard University faculty voted to approve a 20% cap on the number of A’s per undergraduate course in an effort to curb grade inflation. It won’t apply to A-minuses, which committee members predicted would become the most awarded grade.
> At the University of Michigan, a review by the news site MLive found that 74.1% of all undergraduate grades in 2022 were an A+, A or A-. A decade earlier, that percentage was 57.6%.
If one doesn't plan on applying to grad school immediately after undergrad then hopefully there is less self-imposed grade pressure.
Eventually this will lower the bar for everyone.
As an alum I've observed both:
* kids who partied hard first semester since grades didn't matter only to struggle second semester
* kids who benefited from this transition because they didn't go to Hotchkiss
I ended up in both buckets and I have mixed feelings about this since it helped and hurt me.
In the long run - it really didn't matter.
But then I was just horrified to read apparently they got rid of that system in 2017 [1], and now it's a normal letter grade?! Assuming that Hopkins still skews quite harshly on grading, that's an awful regression.
[1] https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2016/05/university-to-...
For most students college is nothing like high school.
They aren't a meaningful signal for how capable a person is by the end of the program. But maybe the fix would be to not count them towards the GPA/permanent transcript, while still providing the achieved grade to the students so they have a measure of how they did.
My anecdotal experience with the University of California system was that course load was a step down from Highschool university prep (which wasn't that bad). Classes were easier than their AP counterparts, and most students who struggled had an issue with attending morning classes after late nights socializing.
My impression from family going through this process now is that the high school prep has only gotten more intense, so what is the gap? Has college gotten significantly harder in the last 20 years?
Which did you find to be the case?
It's everything else with self regulation. Where most college prep goes wrong is at home, in not allowing appropriate agency for the child to make decisions before college. When you go from having to ask to go to the bathroom to being entirely independent in 2 months, bad shit happens.
This lesson has held true everywhere I've worked, from small junior colleges to D1 state schools.
Subsequently, college has gotten harder, but so has k-12, so proportionately, no it's not more difficult now
Anyways, the biggest tech companies in Michigan are automakers, Dow chemicals, and Whirlpool. These are all respectable places and have different expectations than X or OpenAI or companies like that.
They really ought to do a follow up for 2026. From what I gather talking to faculty and professors, this problem became noticeably worse since COVID and the years following. A follow up book or study would be very interesting to read.
I remember the first semester in the dorms was mostly the sound of coughing.
Building up the immune system takes disease exposure and that takes time.
Addnib all the immune system depressants and increased exposure events there at Michigan - booze, pot, late nights, hookups, crowds, stress, etc - and you get a perfect storm for the immune system to take a beating.